This week, I decided that it was time to find some beautiful flowers to put in the reception room of our English Conversation school in Fuse, Higashi Osaka東大阪布施 . I went to the flower shop I usually go to right in the Fuse shopping alley and had a look at the flowers they were offering this week. These wonderful bright yellow Zantedeschia（カラー） caught my eye immediately. Not only the bright yellow color, I was attracted by their curious form as well. As I did not know their name Japanese, I asked the shop assistant to tell me – she was so kind to write it down: “カラー”. The Japanese Katakana name resembles a couple of English words quite well, like collar, calla and color; but not their English name Zantedeschia. I then got really curious about it and looked it right up in the English Wikipedia page. As nearly almost, I could find some hints there, as the plant is also called arum lily, calla or calla lily and distantly related to the “real” calla which grows in the Northern hemisphere. On the Wikipedia page about the Calla I could further find out that in former times, the Zantedeschia from Southern Africa formed one family with the Northern Calla and was separated later. Thus the confusing common English and Japanese names.
So far for the origin of the name, just have a close look at the beautiful Zantedeschia (カラー) and enjoy them as the English Conversation students 英会話生徒 here at our school in Fuse布施 do. As always, many of them like to compliment the flowers, and some of them actually know a lot about different flowers and on how to keep them in a good condition for a long time. So I could keep the flowers for two weeks in winter. Sadly, these calla lily カラー are not so long lived – I just got them on on Tuesday and already only one of the three flowers is left. Like the cherry blossoms, they seemed to be short lived and we can enjoy their beauty only for a short while.
If you want to read about the flower in Japanese, here is the link to the Japanese Wikipedia page.
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